Monday, January 22, 2018

No one seems to know quite what to make of it, so we will
just report the facts. The City of Lights, one of the most beautiful cities in
the world, a leading tourist destination, Paris is infested with rats. I do not
know for sure but I suspect that Paris has more rats than New York.

Of course, it seems slightly perverse for two cities to
compete over how many rats they have. Apparently, it’s the food, tossed away by
restaurants, that attracts the rats. So, Paris has more rats because it offers
them better leftovers.

Horrific
footage of a mass build-up of savage rats who ‘jump for the throat’ has caused
shock in Paris.

Le
Parisien, the French capital’s local paper, on Sunday published a video of
scores of the creatures massing in a dustbin.

It was
taken on the banks of the River Seine, in the centre of all the most popular
tourist spots, including Notre Dame Cathedral and the Orsay art gallery.

This
has been getting worse during the past year.

‘For the past year, there’s been a proliferation of rats in all areas bordering
the Seine,’ a council worker says on the video.

‘A
colleague told me that a rat jumped at his throat, and another towards his arm.
To my knowledge, there haven’t been any bites for the moment, but we shouldn’t
be waiting for a tragedy.’

What is the municipal government doing to solve the problem? It instituted an extermination program last September, budgeted at
less than $2,000,000. If you honestly think that a couple of million euros will
exterminate the rats, you are dreaming:

A
£1.4 million extermination programme was launched last September, with areas closed
off during the killings, but it has by no means proved successful.

There
are now so many rats that Roma crime gangs have been seen using dead ones to
intimidate tourists while trying to steal from them.

For your information, Roma people are what we would call gypsies.

Apparently, the rats are everywhere:

Tourists
including hundreds from Britain regularly report sightings of the creatures all
over the city, including gardens around the Louvre, and even scuttling along
restaurant floors.

Council
spokesman Mao Peninou said: ‘All the departments involved have faced the
problem head on.’

Paris
is the most popular tourist city in the world, and the biggest foreign visitor
group are the British.

Of course, we do not want to poison the rats. It would be
environmentally unfriendly. Then again, rats are living beings. Rodent beings,
but living nonetheless. How dare we think of exterminating them?

At least,
Parisians love all of God’s creatures equally and are committed to the environment.

I just wonder which arondissements (sp?)have the most rats. Perhaps the city government could pay a bounty for dead rats; though then they'd have to have an incinerator or some secure storage area from which they couldn't easily be stolen and be turned in again.